Dustin Curtis

Designer, hacker, investor, nomad.

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Black Widow

Twitter has an enormous advantage over Facebook in one key area: while people on Facebook tend to friend their friends, people on Twitter tend to follow their interests. The social graph that makes up Twitter is worth far more on a per-account basis because it is directly monetizable in a way that Facebook’s generally isn’t – you can show prophylactic advertisements to Twitter users based solely on the people they follow, and probably get a much higher rate of interest. Compared to other social display ads, Twitter ads, it is rumored, work extremely well.

Outside of the direct value from its graph, Twitter is in an extremely unusual position for a social service. While it is ostensibly a sharing service, it is actually a broadcasting medium. People use Twitter more like they use TV; they follow accounts they are interested in, namely celebrities and companies, and then they consume the...

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Flipboard CEO Mike McCue quits Twitter’s board of directors

I’ve been hearing rumblings which suggest that Flipboard is about to be blocked from Twitter’s API, following Instagram’s blockage last week. What is Twitter thinking?

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Dear Marissa

Alfred J. Amoroso, in Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo! offer letter:

Dear Marissa:

On behalf of Yahoo! Inc., I am pleased to offer you the position of President and Chief Executive Officer, reporting to the Company’s Board of Directors, working at the Company’s headquarters at 701 First Avenue in Sunnyvale, California.

$83,333.33 per month salary, and about $60 million in total compensation over five years. A great deal for Yahoo!. I was expecting much, much more.

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Dalton Caldwell’s Audacious Proposal

Dalton Caldwell is refocusing App.net into a realtime feed platform, which he proposed in What Twitter Could Have Been:

I believe so deeply in the importance of having a financially sustainable realtime feed API & service that I am going to refocus App.net to become exactly that. I have the experience, vision, infrastructure and team to do it. Additionally, we already have much of this built: a polished native iOS app, a robust technical infrastructure currently capable of handing ~200MM API calls per day with no code changes, and a developer-facing API provisioning, documentation and analytics system. This isn’t vaporware.

To manifest this grand vision, we are officially launching a Kickstarter-esque campaign. We will only accept money for this financially sustainable, ad-free service if we hit what I believe is critical mass. I am defining minimum critical mass as $500,000, which...

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Digg Overtakes Facebook with 1400% Growth, 22.6 Million Uniques

Richard Macmanus, at ReadWriteWeb, on June 20th, 2007:

According to recent Compete data, digg has overtaken Facebook in number of unique visitors and has grown 1400% in one year. Compete’s May 2007 data states that digg had 22.6 Million unique visitors, while Facebook had 20.2 Million.

Today, Betaworks announced that it has acquired the core assets of Digg, for a rumored $500,000.

Facebook, on the other hand, is now worth $66,000,000,000.

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The BlackBerry Car

Al Sacco interviewed RIM CEO Thorsten Heins at CIO. It’s a very run-of-the-mill interview, but Heins’ answer to the last question is a zinger:

Finally, I’d like to ask you for a prediction: Where will RIM be in one year from now? In July of 2013, what will I be writing about RIM and BlackBerry?

I think you will be writing that you are surprised by the performance and the user experience of the BlackBerry 10 product, that it helps you achieve your daily objectives but also have fun. By then you will see that this is a true mobile computing platform that allows BlackBerry to even explore other domains and spaces, like automotive, in cars.

It takes a certain kind of CEO to say something like that in public. Also, I sure can’t wait to see how the “BlackBerry 10 product” finally helps me “achieve [my] daily objectives”.

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Stripe’s Investors

Alexia Tsotsis, at TechCrunch:

Despite investment from three out of five PayPal co-founders, Stripe actually competes directly with PayPal […].

“Despite”? I see this fact as far more revealing. PayPal should be the biggest and most successful bank in the history of the world, but due to eBay’s horrific incompetence, it’s not. PayPal’s founders probably still want to see their ultimate vision come to fruition. Who better to invest in than Stripe, a company with the opportunity, the will, the talent, and the resources to reach PayPal’s ultimate vision?

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Newspaper Industry Is Running Out of Time to Adapt to Digital Future

Strange to watch The New York Times publicly contemplate its own existence.

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Predictions.txt

For as long as I can remember, I’ve kept a text file with my large, high-level predictions for the industries and companies I’m tracking. Now I’m going to make part of it public. (I wrote these in February.)

  • Television
    Apple is going to enter the television market. Samsung will be blindsided. Vizio will become the only worthy competitor in the market. It’s going to look exactly like the MP3 player market in 2001. Once again, software is the key.

  • Search
    Semantic/contextual/intelligent web searching will kill Google if Google doesn’t disrupt itself. Eventually. Google search is a terrible experience for normal people. They don’t know which links they can trust. Some service in the future is going to curate the top 100,000 or 1,000,000 queries into a list of great, precise results. Siri would be a great interface into that kind of system. “Siri, what camera should I buy?” would probably...

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Bradbury on the future

“People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.”

RAY BRADBURY, 1920–2012

I didn’t know much about Ray Bradbury until a couple of weeks ago, after he died. The man was an artist with words. The more I learn about him, the more I am impressed by his thoughts: he was controversial, eloquent, and contrarian; and he didn’t care what people thought of him.

The world is a worse place without him.

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